First, "Hooray for ST." Now that that's out of the way, I'm finding that approx. 50% to 75% of the results I click on are no longer active. The majority are 'expired' while the remainder are 'deleted'. Why so many?

That said, 50-75% is surprisingly high. Could you post here or email me the URL of your results page? I have a theory as to why some searches return more deleted results than others that I'd like to check. Thanks!

That said, 50-75% is surprisingly high. Could you post here or email me the URL of your results page? I have a theory as to why some searches return more deleted results than others that I'd like to check. Thanks!

Thanks! In the past what has sometimes happened is that a spammer will post an ad, it will be flagged and deleted, so they'll post it again, it'll be deleted again, etc. Since Google's index has no way of immediately knowing these ads have been deleted, it will show all of them, and you'll end up with many different copies of the same spam posting, all but one of which have already been deleted.

That said, I believe we've fixed that problem by filtering out duplicate posts, so I wanted to make sure that wasn't what was happening to you. And indeed, I don't see any duplicates in those search results. If you are running into a lot of deleted ads though, all I can say really is that you must be getting unlucky with that particular search. As the FAQ answer I linked to says, in that case you're probably better off using either the Direct Results Mode, or for searches you run often, the RSS Feeds Tool.